BRAZILIAN GAYS DEMAND THAT FIDEL CASTRO ASK FOR FORGIVENESS FOR THE PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS IN CUBA

Grupo Gay da Bahia, the oldest homosexual non-governmental organization in Latin America, demands that the dictator Fidel Castro, before his death, recognizes and asks for forgiveness for the grave errors of the Cuban revolution responsible for the demoralization, persecution, imprisonment in concentration camps, forced labor, torture, deportation, and death of thousands of gays, transvestites and lesbians in Cuba.

The unfortunate resolution approved during The First Cuban National Congress on Education and Culture of 1971 decreed that “homosexual deviations represent a anti-social pathology, making it inadmissible in any way their manifestations, or propagation, establishing as preventive measure the shunning of recognizable homosexual artists and intellectuals from interaction with the [Cuban] youth, barring gays, lesbians, and transvestites from representing Cuba artistically in festivals abroad.

Harsh penalties were then established to be applied to “the depraved who are repeat offenders and to the incorrigible anti-social elements.”

Many homosexual artists and writers were persecuted during that period of time, namely:

Virgilio Piñera, Lezama Lima, Gallagas, Anton Arrulat, Ana Maria Simon, and even the North-American poet Allen Ginsberg, who was deported [from Cuba] for having spread the permanent rumor in Cuba and abroad that Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, was a closeted homosexual. Another persecuted North-American was the journalist Allen Young who went from poster boy of the Cuban revolution to persona non grata for having denounced the cruelty of the homophobia existent on that island. While visiting Brazil, Young became famous for having refused to greet the then president Castelo Branco.

In 1980, according to official briefings seventeen hundred “incorrigible homosexuals” were deported from Cuba to the United States, even though human rights organizations estimate that number to be higher than ten thousand gays and transvestites deported from their homeland.

At the beginning of the AIDS crisis, Cuba was denounced internationally for creating tough prisons for what they called the “sidosos” (a pejorative term for people ill from HIV/AIDS), most of them homosexuals.

inferno which is what it still represents to this day for gays in a country that never learned the lesson from Che Guevara:

And yet it is said that even Guevara upon finding the book Teatro Completo by Virgilio Piñera, an openly admitted homosexual, in the Library of the Cuban Embassy in Algiers that he threw it against the wall saying:
“How come you keep in our embassy a book by a “pájaro maricón”?!”, the latter being the equivalent of “effeminate faggot”.
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55 (int. phone code for Brazil) + 71 – 3328.3783 or 55 + 71 – 9989.4748. Posted by Luiz Mott, http://br.geocities.com/luizmottbr Andrés Duques